The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900Cambridge University Press, 1989 M09 29 - 434 pages Of all the terms with which Americans define themselves as members of society, few are as elusive as "middle class." This book traces the emergence of a recognizable and self-aware "middle class" between the era of the American Revolution and the end of the nineteenth century. The author focuses on the development of the middle class in larger American cities, particularly Philadelphia and New York. He examines the middle class in all its complexity, and in its day-to-day existence--at work, in the home, and in the shops, markets, theaters, and other institutions of the big city. The book places the new language of class---in particular the new term "middle class"--in the context of the concrete, interwoven experiences of specific anonymous Americans who were neither manual workers nor members of urban upper classes. |
Contents
The elusive middle class | 1 |
Middling sorts in the eighteenthcentury city | 17 |
Toward white collar nonmanual work in Jacksonian America | 66 |
Republican prejudice work wellbeing and social definition | 108 |
Things are in the saddle consumption urban space and the middleclass home | 138 |
Coming to order voluntary associations and the organization of social life and consciousness | 192 |
Experience and consciousness in the antebellum city | 230 |
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adelphia alleys American cities American Revolution antebellum artisans associations Boston Cambridge census century churches city directory city's clerical clerks Club Company Culture described distinct domestic downtown early economic eighteenth-century elite emerging ethnic example factory Figure Freemasonry Greek Revival grid-unit Harper's historians Historical Society homes households houses Hunt's Ibid identified identities incomes industrial institutions Jacksonian Jacksonian era Journal Labor large numbers larger less listed lived Magazine male manual workers manufacturers master mechanics merchants Metropolis middle class neighborhoods New-York New-York Historical Society nineteenth nineteenth-century nonmanual businessmen nonmanual sector organizations parlor patterns Pennsylvania Philadelphia Philadelphia Cricket Club political population professionals proprietors reported Revolution salary Sam Bass Sean Wilentz shops significant skilled Social History sort specific Street Streetcar Suburbs suburbs suggest temperance movement Temperance Society trades upper class urban wages wards wealth West Philadelphia white-collar Wilentz William women working-class workshops York City young